My client is using a software product that, in its latest inception, decided
to switch most of its descriptive/name fields from (A) Alphanumeric to (O)
DBCS-Open data types.
There are hundreds or thousands of queries that have been developed over the
years using SEQUEL (not to be confused with SQL), which apparently has
problems supporting this data. It turns out that if we specify (for
example) SST(problem_field, 1, 30) then SEQUEL does what we want, but
careers can be made in locating each of these fields and then making the
appropriate change to each and performing the necessary testing. And with
the caveat that these sorts of problems are found only at run time, this has
the potential of being a longstanding nightmare.
To bridge this gap, I would like to create SQL views and/or DDS logical
files over the problem physicals, whereby the "view" would have (A)-type
data, thereby giving us an intermediate file against which to query until
the SEQUEL problem is resolved. (There is no current ETA for such
resolution.) I cannot seem to come up with a means of converting the data
with any - shall we say "interesting" - DDS file descriptions. I'm sure I
could fairly easily write an SQL function that could be used in an SQL view
(e.g. DBCS2ALPHA), but I'd rather avoid that if only for performance
reasons. In my initial design, the views would have the same name as the
physical, but would reside in a different library, which would ideally be
first in the query's library list, hopefully limiting the complexity of this
whole scenario.
Is this a problem that has been solved before by anyone on this list who
might be willing to share? Do you have a trick for handling a DBCS-Open
field as alpha, for example? Do you have some other solution?
Dennis Lovelady
404-386-9745 (c)
AIM: delovelady MSN: fastcounter@xxxxxxxxxxxx
--
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it
through not dying."
- Woody Allen
<
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dennislovelady> View Dennis Lovelady's profile
on LinkedIn
midrange.com
